Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a Biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Aaron Shafawaloff, my colleague at MRM. And Aaron, we are continuing our discussion dealing with the incarnation of Jesus, the differences between how Mormon leaders have described this event and how Christians have historically understood it. Today we want to look at the opinion of some of the Mormon apologists, particularly one. And in talking about that, we should mention to our listeners that even though there are apologists that will tend to deny this doctrine on what they call an official basis, or what they would say is not a doctrine, some of them actually are sympathetic to it. Why don't you talk about that a little bit? It's important that listeners understand that we're not just pulling out one single quote from crazy old Brigham Young in the attic and holding it against Mormonism forevermore.
That's not the limited scope of the evidence here. We're talking about tons of Mormon leaders who've taught this, and it's something that modern Mormon apologists toy with to some degree as an acceptable or tolerable doctrine. There's a Mormon apologist, if you could say among us that you had a favorite Mormon apologist.
Mine would be Kevin Barney. He works with Fair, and I consider him in many ways a respectable guy. I like a lot of what he writes because it has a degree of honesty that other Mormon apologists don't exhibit.
And he seems to be really, really astute with history. He writes that, quote, in a post titled The Sexual Generation of Jesus, he writes, quote, my usual tack when asked about it, and I should review for listeners really quick. We're talking about this issue that Mormon leaders have essentially taught that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary in order to conceive Jesus. It's become more of a minority view today among members and sort of floating there as a significant strain of belief. It's not openly talked about.
Let me interrupt you for a minute. You say it's a minority view of a lot of members. Do you think it's more because they just haven't read about it and they've never heard about it before? Or it's just that they've read it and rejected it?
The first, not the second. It's that many haven't even heard about it. And like you've said earlier, even when they do hear about it, because of their worldview, they find it very acceptable and very tolerable often, not always. Yeah, because I have found examples when I have talked with Mormons and they've never heard about this before and immediately they're usually appalled that I would even make up such a horrible lie about their own leaders. Really, I'm just quoting their own leaders.
That's all I'm doing. But then when they seem to find out that that's exactly what their leaders taught, that seems to make it okay for them, which just boggles my mind. Literally, you can chart out conversations we've had with Mormons.
We're in two minutes. A Mormon goes from finding the idea as reprehensible to finding the idea as quite pleasing and acceptable. The idea that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary to conceive Jesus fits in many ways with the larger Mormon worldview. That God the Father has a body of flesh and bones. That he is a sexual being. That he has a gender. That Heavenly Father and Mother have distinct genders and gender roles. And that that's an eternal thing.
And that if you saw Heavenly Father, he'd look like a man just like you. That's what Joseph Smith said. That God the Father does not have the ability in Mormonism to make matter out of nothing.
All of his miracles are basically working with existing materials. Anyway, so Kevin Barney writes, Maybe it is because I have a streak of old-fashioned Mormonism somewhere inside me, but I find it appealing on several levels. First, there is a certain naturalism to the idea. I presume the mortal Jesus had 46 chromosomes and that 23 came from Mary, but where did the other 23 come from? As a Mormon, I'm not big on the idea that they were created ex nihilo for this specific purpose.
Ex nihilo means created from nothing. I like being able to say that Jesus really did have a father, not in a metaphorical sense only, but in a physical sense. He really was the Son of God. For Kevin Barney, the idea that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary sort of strengthens that idea. Quoting on, Is that just some sort of cosmic joke?
Does God sit and yonder heavens and look down on his creatures and laugh at their disgusting and dirty and ridiculous actions? Isn't it possible that, if God ordains sexual intercourse as the means by which we create children, that it is divinely appointed and not disgusting or dirty at all? I freely concede that the old-fashioned Mormon speculators did not think all the way through this idea. And there are some theological loose ends, to be sure, but I'm curious, does anyone else here find this kind of, like this old notion, or is it just Mormon materialism run amuck?
So that's ending the quote from Kevin Barney, who's a respectable intellectual defender of the Mormon faith. So at this point we should probably interject one of the reasons why we, as Bible-believing Christians, have a very serious disagreement with this notion is because of who Mary is in the Mormon scheme of things. She just isn't a created human. She is also, in Mormonism, considered the literal offspring of God the Father himself. We would all be the literal children of God. Mary would be one of the literal children of God. So in essence, the way we picture this in the grand scheme of things is here we have a God who has a body of flesh and bones coming down and having a physical relationship with his own daughter. That becomes very disturbing to us. It's an incestuous union.
Pick the dots. I've actually read where some Mormons can't understand why we have a problem with that. I think the bigger issue for me is that, like Kevin himself said, the issue is the view of the nature of God. In Mormonism, all spirit is just a finer form of matter in that God himself is of the human species. When we think of the sonship of Jesus, I'll put it this way, the method of the incarnation of Jesus matters because of the meaning of the incarnation of Jesus. The meaning of the incarnation is that the eternal Son of God, this second person of the Trinity who has always been God and always forevermore will be, he takes on 100% human nature. He's not a hybrid God-man. He is a full 100% God and 100% human. So he has two natures, distinct, but they're still there as part of his being in person now. That's just the Son of God is 100% man and 100% God. And at the incarnation, he wasn't changing his nature, he was adding a nature. The method of the incarnation, the miraculous conception of Jesus within Mary, there being zero male participation, really speaks to the fact that this is God in the flesh. It was God's way of announcing to the world that this is special and it points to the deity and the authority of Jesus. Bruce McConkie calls the Mormon Jesus a demigod because he's sort of a hybrid God-man. That's very different. So anyway, the other thing I think we should respond to is Kevin Barney's notion that the reason we don't like the idea that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary is because we have this sort of puritanical idea that sex is dirty or disgusting.
And I would respond by saying, no, it's not because of that. This God-given thing called sex is a good thing within marriage. It's a beautiful thing, but we don't see God the Father as essentially human. We're not pagans. We're not meshing the idea of God and man so much that we think that it's not even possible for God to have sexual relations with man. In Christianity, we believe that God is transcendent. He is unlike his creation. And in Mormonism, of course, they would say that we as humans are actually of the same species as God.
He just seems to have a bigger, more advanced head start on us. Right. Well, later we're going to be reading a bunch of quotes from Mormon leaders who have taught that God the Father had sexual relations with Mary. I just wanted to point this quote from Kevin Barney out, though, because I want people to realize this isn't it's not as though we just sort of came out.
We've gone off the reservation or we've just sort of come out from left field and we're just sort of making this up. This isn't some sort of chestnut sort of hidden gem that we found in the journal discourses. This is a whole tradition of teaching among members. And this is something that modern Mormon apologists still we wouldn't even be having to talk about this if it wasn't a part of the traditional teachings of the Mormon leadership.
And I think that needs to be stressed. This isn't just an isolated quote from, like you say, Brigham Young or someone like that. These are numerous Mormon leaders who have said basically the same way using a few different words, but it still comes out the same. If you were to read these statements, you would draw the conclusion that this sounds very clearly like they are saying that here is the Mormon God who has a body of flesh and bones coming down and having a physical relationship with Mary.
And yet how many times when we bring this up, we get accused of taking an innocent statement. In fact, FAIR, the same group that Kevin Barney is with, put out a statement saying typically critics either take statements from non-authoritative books or take an innocent phrase and make it sound like it says something it doesn't. Well, I just want to point out with this Barney quote that this is a respectable Mormon intellectual defender of the Mormon faith. And for me, he's just confirming what we've been saying for decades that the Mormon leaders taught.
The very fact that he's even willing to speculate on something like that should tip you off that something's wrong here. And definitely when we look at what the Bible actually has to say about Jesus' incarnation and then we compare it with the teachings of what Mormon leaders have said about it, we find that there is in fact a distinct difference separating us. That this is not at all a similarity that we share, even though they may use the same phrase, virgin birth. Thank you for listening. If you would like more information regarding Mormonism Research Ministry, we encourage you to visit our website at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.
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